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NHL Slapshot is EA’s go at creating an all-ages, casual-friendly hockey game. It comes with a black plastic peripheral that does an admirable job of turning a Wii Remote and Nunchuk into a hockey stick. Although it’s kind of a bitch putting it together. The manual does a terrible job at explaining it (no pictures!), but to make up for that the game rolls an assembly video for you on the first boot-up.

NHL Slapshot is, thus far, pretty good – it’s using EA’s well-worn hockey know-how – but you can tell the game is designed for a heretofore untrod middle ground: casual enough that you don’t care about player likenesses and deep crunchy hockey simming, but not so casual that you’d want the players in Mii form or cartoonified like the Backyard Sports series.

For the First Thirty, I did a quick-play all-defaults game of regulation hockey (Hershey Bears versus the Czech Republic, if you must know), checked out some of the minigames, and started the game’s quirky Peewee to Pro mode.

Obviously your first question is about the peripheral. Yes, you’re expected to use swinging motions to take shots at the goal. A short swing gives you a normal hit, a big shoulder-to-earth swing does a scorching slapshot. As with many motion controlled versions of standard games, I’m left wondering why this method is better than just hitting a button. It works well enough, although sometimes I felt like the mega-slapshot-swing was not registering, often just giving me the regular speed shot.

You check by thrusting the stick forward, which is pretty cool.

The game supports Remote+Nunchuk play without the peripheral and even Remote-by-itself play. Although in every case you’re still swinging the Remote to shoot, so don’t expect you can out-maneuever this game’s determination to use motion controls.

The Peewee angle is NHL Slapshot’s other defining gimmick. You can play as kids in a no-rules beginner’s rink. Although I don’t think the AI here is actually set to “kid”. I’ve seen plenty of peewee hockey and these AI peewees are leagues better. In the Peewee to Pro campaign mode, you begin with a kid character and take him all the way to the NHL, divvying out experience points and choosing special skill boosters along the way. Peewee players are all over the loading screens, including a young Gretzky on the box art, so you know the game is gunning for that family audience.

I’m into it. For all the silliness of the plastic stick, at least this is one case where the motion controls will not beat the hell out of your arms in an hour. We’ll see how I feel after the impressively gargantuan task of leading a custom player from age 8 to 38 across four separate hockey leagues.

NHL Slapshot will be in stores this week for $60.